Phishing Attempt or Poor Customer Communications?

I’ve just ran into what’s either a really poor customer communications from Hewlett-Packard, or a pretty good targeted phishing attempt.

The e-mail, as received earlier today:
From: gcss-case@hpordercenter.com
Subject: PCC-Cust_advisory
Dear MIKE JAHNKE,
HP has identified a potential, yet extremely rare issue with HP
BladeSystem c7000 Enclosure 2250W Hot-Plug Power Supplies manufactured prior to March 20, 2008. This issue is extremely rare; however, if it does occur, the power supply may fail and this may result in the unplanned shutdown of the enclosure, despite redundancy, and the enclosure may become inoperable.
HP strongly recommends performing this required action at the customer's earliest possible convenience. Neglecting to perform the required action could result in the potential for one or more of the failure symptoms listed in the advisory to occur. By disregarding this notification, the customer accepts the risk of incurring future power supply failures.
Thank you for taking our call today, as we discussed please find Hewlett Packard's Customer Advisory - Document ID: c01519680.
You will need to have a PDF viewer to view/print the attached document.
If you don't already have a PDF viewer, you can download a free version from Adobe Software, www.adobe.com
The interesting SMTP headers for the e-mail:
Received: from zoytoweb06 ([69.7.171.51]) by smtp1.orderz.com with Microsoft SMTPSVC(6.0.3790.3959);
Fri, 16 Apr 2010 10:22:02 -0500
Return-Path: gcss-case@hpordercenter.com
Message-ID: 5A7CB4C6E58C4D9696B5F867030D280C@domain.zoyto.com
The interesting observations:
  • They spelled my name wrong and used ‘Mike’ not ‘Michael’
  • The source of the e-mail is not hp.com, nor is hp.com in any SMTP headers. The headers reference hpordercenter.com, Zyoto and orderz.com
  • hpordercenter.com Zyoto and orderz.com all have masked/private Whois information.
  • The subject is “PCC-Cust_advisory”, with – and _ for word spacing
  • Embedded in the e-mail is a link to an image from the Chinese language version of HP’s site: http://….hp-ww.com/country/cn/zh/img/….
  • There is inconsistent paragraph spacing in the message body
  • It references a “phone conversation from this morning” which didn’t occur. There was no phone call.
  • It attempts to convey urgency (“customer accepts risk…”)
  • It references an actual advisory, but the advisory is 18 months old and hasn’t been updated in 6 months.
  • Our HP account manager hasn’t seen the e-mail and wasn’t sure if it was legit.
Attached to the e-mail was a PDF.
The attached PDF (yes, I opened it…and no, I don’t know why…) has a URL across the top in a different font, as though it was generated from a web browser:
HP
Did I get phished?
If so, there’s a fair chance that I’ve just been rooted, so I:
  • Uploaded the PDF to Wipawet at the UCSB Computer Security Lab. It showed the PDF as benign.
  • Checked firewall logs for any/all URL’s and TCP/UDP connections from my desktop at the time that I opened the PDF and again after a re-boot. There are no network connections that aren’t associated with known activity.
I’m pretty sure that this is just a really poor e-mail from an outsourcer hired by HP. But just in case… I opened up a ticket with our security group, called desktop support & had them Nuke from orbit, MBR included.

Damn – what a waste of a Friday afternoon.
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